Election Law on Donations Unclear, Experts Say

When Vice President Al Gore recently acknowledged making phone calls from his White House office to raise political donations, it seemed to some an open-and-shut violation of a 1971 law making it illegal to solicit or receive campaign contributions “in any room, area or building where federal employees are engaged in official duties.”

In the hall of mirrors that is federal election law, however, nothing is necessarily what it seems. Many analysts believe that Congress intentionally wrote ambiguous law so its members would have maximum room to maneuver around its proscriptions as they sought reelection.

Such uncertainty about the law is confounding efforts to gauge the culpability of the many actors in the unfolding campaign fund-raising drama. While the practical political effects of the controversy are likely to spell further credibility problems for the administration, legal experts said that they doubt whether the law is strong enough to support criminal prosecutions.

“Based on my 20 years’ experience, there’s substantial doubt on a lot of these provisions,” said Stanley Brand, formerly general counsel of the House. “This law is not a paradigm of clarity.”

Consider, for example, Gore’s telephone solicitations from the White House.

Larry Klayman, a Washington attorney who heads the conservative nonprofit Judicial Watch Inc., believes that Gore’s violation is clear. “You cannot solicit campaign contributions on federal property,” he said.

“Paying for the calls with a campaign credit card--as Gore said he did--doesn’t make it right,” Klayman added. “If that were the case, any time you committed a crime you could pay for it yourself and resolve the matter.”

But Ken Gross, former enforcement chief for the Federal Election Commission, said that the 1971 law--known as Section 607--was principally designed to protect federal employees from being “shaken down” at work by their bosses.

“It was not really intended to keep someone from making phone calls to persons outside the government, as the vice president did,” he said.

Not surprisingly, interpretations of election law often seem to depend on the political persuasion of the interpreter.

C. Boyden Gray, White House counsel under former President Bush, said he believes Gore clearly broke the law.

“It’s clear that Section 607 covers the solicitation of nonfederal employees,” Gray said. “The solicitation isn’t limited to people who happen to be standing right in front of you.”

But Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel for the Clinton administration, takes the opposite view, more akin to that of Gross. Quinn said courts have interpreted acts of solicitation to occur where they were received--in Gore’s case, outside the White House. In addition, electioneering laws generally exclude the president and vice president from their coverage, Quinn said.

Meanwhile, Congress has gone somewhat easy on itself in adhering to the 1971 law, adding further to doubts about its strength. Federal lawmakers, for example, are permitted to accept contributions in their offices as long as they relinquish them to a political committee within seven days.

That concession has reverberated in the executive branch.

After it was disclosed that Margaret Williams, chief of staff to First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, had accepted a $50,000 campaign check in the White House from a California donor, the White House contended that Williams had not actually “received” the donation.

Williams only took it as a courtesy, then quickly gave it to the Democratic National Committee, officials argued.

The donation Williams handled was from Johnny Chien Chuen Chung, a Taiwanese American businessman from Torrance, Calif., and has become part of more than $3 million in contributions that the DNC has returned.

Much of that money was returned because of concerns that it was linked to foreign interests. And it has long been an article of faith that introducing foreign money into a U.S. election campaign is a clear violation of law.

Both Gross and Brand agreed that such funds are prohibited when intended for use by a candidate.

But from that point, the issue becomes more complicated.

While contributions from a foreigner are illegal, donations that come from the U.S. subsidiary of a foreign corporation are allowable, legal experts said. “But this assumes the money is derived from activities conducted in the United States,” Brand said. “In other words, the subsidiary cannot be a conduit for a foreign corporation or foreign individuals.”

A Justice Department task force, with the aid of a federal grand jury, reportedly is investigating whether some Asian Americans were “fronting” for foreign interests in contributing to the Clinton-Gore reelection campaign.

Besides violating campaign finance laws, such conduct could run foul of federal money-laundering statutes or could constitute bribery attempts, if return favors were sought from federal officials. And violations of the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act could apply if people representing foreign interests had failed to register with the Justice Department, attorneys said.

But the fact that in many instances “soft money” is at stake--donations to a political party’s national committee or to a group other than directly to a campaign--further clouds the legal picture, some attorneys said.

Craig Donsanto, the Justice Department’s top election expert, said in a written opinion last year that the ban on foreign gifts does not cover soft money, which is considered to be largely unregulated. And Atty. Gen. Janet Reno cautioned reporters last week to pay attention to the strict definition of “contribution” when referring to Williams’ acceptance of $50,000 in the White House.

Reno suggested that such a soft-money gift might not be covered by federal election regulations.

Bert Brandenburg, Reno’s chief spokesman, said later that “it is the established practice of the career prosecutors in the criminal division that the definition of ‘contribution’ does not include most soft money.”

Gross disagreed with that interpretation, arguing that the foreign prohibition would apply if any soft-money funds were used to support actual candidates, as distinct from political party-building activities.

Leon E. Panetta, former White House chief of staff and a lawyer, recently acknowledged that the Clinton reelection committee helped direct more than $35 million in soft-money contributions to pay for campaign commercials.

Panetta, however, said that this was not illegal because the money was spent as part of an overall “Democratic strategy in confronting the Republican Congress.”

If Reno persists in her view that soft-money donations are not covered by campaign laws, legal experts predicted that this would be her likely rationale for continuing to stiff-arm demands that she seek appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the various fund-raising controversies.